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ZINAIDA TESSLER HAS A SCORCHING, GOREY, GUT TWISTING VENDETTA against someone who she's never met. Who killed her parents, is the question?
It's anger. It's vexation. It's a steak over the killer's head. Raw skin pressed against fiery coals, burning. Paint her palet a fiery red, let the bombs of crimson sketch their way across her hindsight; her mother and father weathering away beneath the ocean's loving tide. It's okay baby . . . it's okay baby . . . let them go. They're sinking, away, and away, and away, out of reach and out of heart. This world was never meant for them. They're nameless now, floating vessels on a sea of endless oblivion, crushed and broken and lifeless like the dead waterlilies in the marsh.
They're free. Aren't they?
Death follows us all, as a friend contrary to foe. The pain would cease to flourish if she accepted it once and for all.
But we are all the same, Marina says to her daughter. All life is connected like little tacks on a map with string woven between them. You'll never go away. Your skin will wrinkle and your eyes won't work as well as they used to, and eventually — as morbid and unconventional as it may seem — you'll die. When the children look up at the night sky and lay eyes on the stars, it'll be you. So beautiful and astronomical, just like the masterpieces at the Louvre. You'll be metamorphic like moonlight and eternal like stardust. You are forever. Death isn't going away. There's no use in fearing it, baby. We are both the trees dancing in the wind and the rocks lining the ocean's shores. We are everything. The earth loves you. Trust it.
. . . blah blah blah blah blah, and more hippie shit like that.
It's all just stuff that her mom used to say to get her to fall asleep. Kinda boring — but mind boggling now that she thinks back to it. How could it not be? How could it not twist her mind? Tess can't spend too long with it on her conscious without slipping into a depressive state, wanting to hold her knees to her chest and sob for hours.
Her parents may have washed away, but Tess isn't gone. Not yet, at least. It doesn't stop her from missing the strawberry jam Marina used to make, or the bear hugs Levi would give her whenever she came home from school, crying because Abby Whittaker said her hello kitty crocs were ugly. Tess misses being important to someone like that, she misses being innocent and cherishing the belief that love would last forever. She hates that she didn't reciprocate it more and let them know how much they meant to her, and it'll be her dying wish for her parents to have known that their daughter loved them. God, she loved them so much.
It's not over though. They aren't the only ones to pay the girl a visit in her nocturnal sleep. Her dreams have a habit of recurring all too often in the form of memories, because it's never as simple as just a dream when it comes to girls like Tess. Girls like Tess see things that aren't there, like dead people and her old friends and things that make her warm and fuzzy inside. Sometimes it seems the only way she'll ever feel joy is in dreams; it's just not in the cards for her in real life. Every good thing that's ever happened to her is gone.
